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Ask HN: Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

#211

Post by mschuster91 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #128
mschuster91 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was not the users. Microsoft's Windows Mobile / Windows Phone and Nokia's Symbian completely failed to keep up with new innovations, which was the real problem. Windows Mobile was a barely consumer-friendly version of Windows CE with a truckload of vendor-specific implementations (which made for a very inconsistent user experience) and the abomination called Windows Phone was completely incompatible on the app sid…

Very concise; and that's pretty much the way I remember it too. Maybe the most remarkable part of all, that had nothing to do with corporate behemoths (AFAIK), was the speed with which society pivoted to embrace the smart phone (specifically, the internet more generally). We live in a completely different world than we did just one decade ago. But I feel a bit like the OP. Soon I may just grab some hardtack, my muzzl…

> Maybe the most remarkable part of all, that had nothing to do with corporate behemoths (AFAIK), was the speed with which society pivoted to embrace the smart phone (specifically, the internet more generally).

Society has always been fast to embrace new technologies, particularly if profits were to be made or economies of scale made prior luxuries affordable for everyone. Industrialization, the advent of the rail age or air travel as mass transit, and now the Internet.

We're using CPUs with more processing power than multiple million dollar 70s-era mainframes in disposable pregnancy or covid tests, and a modern single (!) GPU can blast a 90s-era supercomputer to pieces with GFLOP/s performance.

Re: Ask HN: Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

#212

Post by indigochill »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #74
antocv wrote: post #22

Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing. Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account", yet normal users dont see a problem with it at all and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests. Your question is like, "Why does DRM exist it is ac…

> Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account", yet normal users dont see a problem with it at all and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests. While technically true in terms of theoretical modelling of a market economy, I don't think that's a fair diagnosis in practice. We…

> Instead, I think that the imbalance of power between consumer and industry, network effects, and the disproportionate capital investment needed to disrupt the current market mean that no alternative can take any significant hold.

I don't believe the lack of capital investment is a problem. There's mind-boggling amounts of capital being wasted on the metaverse and blockchain bubble that could be directed towards building a disruptive competitor to any of these companies' flagship products.

Rather, I see the problem being that any time a viable competitor appears, it just gets acquired so there's no longer any need for the incumbent to compete. Case in point, Instagram actually became the next hot social network after Facebook, but Facebook the company retained relevance and market share by simply buying them rather than competing. Google has also acquired a bunch of more niche search engines over its lifetime (that's a little more subtle in that none of those alone were going to beat Google like Instagram did to Facebook, but by nipping niche search providers in the bud, Google consolidated the market share around its product).

Re: Ask HN: Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

#213

Post by voongoto »

Great question! I was thinking about it lately a lot and what I realised is very simple: Developers can’t code great user experiences without an understanding of UX first. How many companies you know which invest in educating devs UX? I know one company from hundreds.

Re: Ask HN: Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

#214

Post by simonh »

r_singh wrote: post #27
antocv wrote: post #22

Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing. Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account", yet normal users dont see a problem with it at all and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests. Your question is like, "Why does DRM exist it is ac…

Users are the last ones to blame. If anything it’s policy makers, investors and industrialists. If you want to participate in society, you need a smartphone, and guess what? The whole world is okay with only 2 companies doing this….

For the same reasons the world is ok with only 2 commercially viable mass market desktop operating systems. Consolidation benefits users. It increases capital investment in the dominant platforms making them better faster; it increases the chances your software and skills will be compatible with your next computer; you benefit if your family, friends or colleagues use a compatible platform; it focuses developer efforts to have fewer platforms to develop for so there’s more better software. Users flock to dominant platforms because it’s in their interests to do so, and in their interests that others do too.

This is why desktop Linux never gets anywhere. Even if one distro was dominant in users, that’s completely decoupled from it getting the lions share of developer support and it wouldn’t give it any advantage in resources. There’s no feedback loop to elevate a dominant distro. Maybe that’s a good thing, perhaps the value in desktop Linux is it’s diversity and ability to address niche specialisation, at the price of market power.

There is a feedback loop in commercial server distros because that is a commercial market, hence RedHat’s dominance.

Re: Ask HN: Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

#215

Post by noncoml »

antocv wrote: post #22

Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing. Nobody is forced to continue using dark-pattern software, nobody was forced to use Apple and tie their credit-card to their "apple cloud account", yet normal users dont see a problem with it at all and just continue even paying for software which is hostile to them and their interests. Your question is like, "Why does DRM exist it is ac…

Victim blaming much?

Re: Ask HN: Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

#216

Post by kortilla »

AstralStorm wrote: post #136
antocv wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a cricket. I told you what to do, dont use that software, dont accept the license or terms, uninstall, deactivate, deny. Read a book, go hiking. You arent forced to use shit software.

Oh boy, tell me how you do tax reports with the amazing experience of pen, paper and standing in a window. I bet you're outsourcing misery rather than avoiding it.

Filing taxes by mail is trivial. I’m not sure your point is coming across here.

Re: Ask HN: Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

#217

Post by sigmaprimus »

zkldi wrote: post #71
sigmaprimus wrote: post #2

I agree with most everything you have said but wonder if it is just the internet or everywhere these days. I recently went through a McDonalds drive thru for the first time in a very long time and felt a longing for the old menu boards that had items and prices clearly listed instead of these TV screens with all the items and prices scattered about like a teenage girls dream collage. I walked into a new BestBuy store…

> There was a movie where a guy got out of prison after a lengthy sentence and his words seem to ring more true to me each and every day: "The world got itself in a damn hurry and it seems there is no place now for a feeble old man like me" Shawshank?

Yeah I think that might be the one, it has been a while since I watched it.

Re: Ask HN: Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

#218

Post by kortilla »

toastal wrote: post #80
noduerme wrote: post #67

You hit the nail on the head -- repeatedly. Shit. I just bought my gf a Roku as a stocking stuffer. We were setting it up and it made her put in her email and phone number to verify. I was appalled; I was like don't put in your email! I'll return it! But she wanted be able to watch YouTube on her TV since Apple removed it without warning from her AppleTV device . My own Roku from a couple years ago works great with n…

Roku is now publicly traded so its beholden to getting quarterly value for shareholder. Investors have deemed all of this data collecting valuable. Capitalism killing innovation by making it another homogeneous device that doesn't respect you doesn't surprise me.

> Roku is now publicly traded so its beholden to getting quarterly value for shareholder. Investors have deemed all of this data collecting valuable

This is not at all now decision making works in publicly traded companies. The feedback loop is much tighter and private companies are just as susceptible to making these decisions.

Re: Ask HN: Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

#219

Post by nicoburns »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #143
kgeist wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most banks and airlines I use rewrote their perfectly fine and fast sites and apps to reactjs and now they seriously suck. This is not the fault of react but more of this idea of tech people that everything has to be new. I doubt they rewrote it just for the sake of rewriting it in a new framework, it costs money for no benefit. What's more likely, which I have witnessed multiple times, is that the original codebase…

Why does it seem (I'm not a backend engineer) that a company moves off of one technical-debt ridden backend to another, even bigger, more complex framework for their backend. It's like we're in a downward tech-debt spiral. Is it going to take an Ever-Given-like or Covid-like disruption of e-commerce that shuts down society to cause us to wake up and take this seriously? (Or have government step in and set standards a…

Presumably because they didn't fix the organisational issues that caused the first codebase to become a mess. If they had those sorted then they could most likely have stuck with the original codebase AND a rewrite would likely be succesful.

Re: Ask HN: Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

#220

Post by t-3 »

pixl97 wrote: post #170
antocv wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can you justify not using Microsoft Office? I never had to justify it, nobody forced me or expected me to be using Office, they expected me to deliver a thesis or other document. When there was the "5% expectation", kindly decline, uninstall. The road I picked, was not always success or easy, I got failed in high school "informatics" class because I could not show that I could use Office. Twice. I refused to le…

If you dont consider most Linux software user hostile in it's own ways then their really isn't much to discuss here. You've just accepted its series of failures, rather than the failures associated with commercial software.

What? How is grep "user hostile"? How is ls user hostile?
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